


My Friend: We Are Dying

by fiddleblocks



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Pre-Slash, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 14:43:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16307156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiddleblocks/pseuds/fiddleblocks
Summary: Frank and David have both made mistakes recently. They need to come back together to correct their mistakes and move forward.





	My Friend: We Are Dying

It only took Frank 12 hours to realize he'd made a mistake by driving away. By then, it was obviously too late. Not only had he missed dinner but he was most of the way through a fifth of cheap, but strong whiskey and was in no shape to drive back just yet and apologize…

 

He owned this moldering old, booby trapped to the teeth cabin in the middle of nowhere. Filled with death and terrible memories. Just like Frank. It was fitting for him. Being a dead man in a dead house. Something putrid and poison running through his veins like the no doubt toxic mold in the baseboards. He'd never been this drunk before. It was almost funny...

 

Frank had had to steal Gunner's ashes from the Medical Examiner's office but he was damned if he was going to break his promise. He came back for Gunner after all. A man like him deserved loyalty from his fellow dead. Frank was really beginning to feel like something of a grim reaper.

 

That's how he'd convinced himself it was okay to leave Lieberman's house and drive out to this nightmare tomb out in the woods. He'd only get his black mold on Lieberman. Only dirty him up. His hands were made of rot and misfortune. Everything he touched turned to shit and death. How could he justify staying and staining something so pure and beautiful?

 

It was bad enough, as a dead man to covet their _lives_. The jealousy that David got to resurrect and be with his family again alone would creep in and poison the hard, beautiful thing that Frank was afraid to examine. The unfathomably deep feeling he got from David looking at him like...

 

And that was why he was laying on the floor in Gunner's (his own, damn Gunner) cabin clutching the ass end of a mostly empty bottle of whiskey. But the alcohol had only served to clear up his misunderstandings. It was hitting him like a truck. Like he was sure the hangover would hit him on the inevitable morning drive back to the cozy suburb David lived in. He had to at least apologize. That much was certain. Maybe even explain…

 

Sure. He could peel the skin off his chest, carve a hole in the muscle underneath and crack open his ribcage for David. The thought of it was equally terrifying and stupidly true. Frank absolutely would do that. Literally and/or figuratively. If that was what it took. If that was what David wanted. Instead he was hammered drunk, laying on his side in a mausoleum surrounded by ghosts. The first drink had chased them away. The fifth or sixth had brought them back with stunning clarity. He could as well lay here and die as go home to David and apologize.

 

He was only 10% alive anyway. Breathing, being, laying here in pain with his head spinning. And through the darkness, it wasn't the ghosts of the dead that were haunting him. That would have been easier than those damn, terrifying beautiful blue eyes gleaming at him. The memory of laying there, David's hot tears mingling with the blood on his face. That was haunting him. David’s broken voice screaming “my friend is dying!” like this was a new and more agonizing kind of fear and pain that he'd ever experienced. Even with the loss of his own family, fresh in his heart, the near loss of Frank ripped David down to a pain and fear that was subprimal. Something animal and deep. That's what those screams were. The sound of an animal about to be eaten by a predator.

 

Frank had _done_ that to David.

 

It would have been so easy to leave right then. Frank had felt something close to contentment and happiness as he lay dying in David's arms. He was tired. All he had to do was take a deep breath and the blood in his mouth would finish the job.

 

“My friend is DYING!” That note of familiar agony and grief. It was enough to make Frank cough and gasp and breathe. He couldn't hurt David like this. It was an easy decision at the time.

 

Deciding to live was easiest while you were dying. It's those moments where you feel truly alive that living seems the harder option. Moments like the one in the hospital. Frank and David joined so fully, intimately. David's heart pumping David's blood into Frank's veins. He'd decided to live but some small part of him resented David for forcing the issue. He'd decided to live but the sad, hopeful look in David’s too big, too blue eyes was making Frank wish he'd given up the ghost in that carousel beside Billy. Frank wanted to cling close to David more than ever but he was terrified of burying him in death and rot. The cognitive dissonance wasn't being drowned by the whiskey. The fifth was almost empty but there was enough to drown the 10% of Frank that was still alive. He could just fill his mouth with the whiskey and take a deep breath in. It would burn. It would be ugly. But it would be over.

 

“My FRIEND is dying…” Like a jolt to his heart. The shock of a defibrillator forcing it to beat again as soon as Frank had decided just to let go.

 

“...fuck ya,” Frank grumbled at the nearest blue thing swimming in his double vision. “Shoulda let me DIE.”

 

“MY friend is dying,” Frank's memory screamed at him and he refrained from bringing the bottle to his lips one last time.

 

Honestly, how _dare_ Lieberman make him hesitate? He had three guns on him right now. He could give himself a quick, clean end to that 10% of him. Put a stop to hauling around all this dead weight and smearing his sickness on everything he loved. But David had staked his claim on him. Called him “MY FRIEND” like David owned Frank. Like he was claiming the responsibility over Frank's life or death as a matter of course.

 

And that was when Frank realized his mistake. He didn't have a right to drive away from David. He didn't have a right to drink himself into delirium, to torture himself in this oubliette of his own memories until aspiration or alcohol poisoning stopped his heart. It wasn't Frank's decision anymore. David had made him live. Frank should have let David take responsibility for that choice when he'd had the chance. Instead, Frank had spit on that decision. He had driven away into rock bottom again and dug himself a nice hole to die in. The certainty washed over him that no matter how far he drove away from David's light, from the shining tower of warmth and wholeness promised in David's eyes, Frank would never be allowed to bury himself anywhere. David would always draw him to the surface with his screams of grief.

 

“My friend is dying!!” It was so loud. So sad. So angry. Defeated. Frank never wanted to hear that again. But it was all he could hear now as he drifted into grey. David crying in a way a man like David was never meant to. David feeling pain that only a man like Frank deserved…

 

Frank faded into a grey that was almost blue and dreamed of David's children tied to a ferris wheel. Of David's face mangled against a mirror and Frank pressing it there. All while David screamed “my _love_ is dying.”

 

**

 

It only took David an hour to realize he'd made a mistake by letting Frank drive away. An hour and Leo asking him why he hadn't just refused to get out of the car. At the time, he justified it by telling himself that Frank would have made a scene. Gotten mad at him. Threatened him. Thrown him bodily from the car and squealed out. He told himself that not forcing Frank was the best chance he had of having Frank come back some day. He didn't want to scare the other man off. He feared he already had. But that was a misunderstanding. He realized it as he washed up for bed. It kept him distracted enough that Sarah only made a cursory attempt to seduce her husband before just cuddling up to him and stroking his hair until she fell asleep with her hand curled in it. He realized while he felt Sarah's breathing slow, her chest rising and falling against his arm that he never should have let Frank leave. Maybe Frank had needed him to insist. David thought about that while he slowly, gently untangled Sarah’s hand from his hair. He barely heard her sleepy murmur as she turned away from him and cuddled her pillow instead.

 

Frank should be downstairs on his couch right now. Digesting the delicious meal Sarah had prepared. Surrounded by people who loved and cared for him. Not off somewhere desperately alone. David looked at Sarah's blonde hair splayed against the pillow and wondered if maybe, by some miracle, Frank had gone to that Karen Page instead of going off somewhere alone.

 

But David knew better. He was smart enough to know that Frank had gone somewhere to be as far away from other people as he could. Somwhere to ruminate on his own pain and suffering. It sent a shock of pain through David's heart to think of it. He'd wanted Frank to be happy and he'd mistakenly thought that leaving him be had been the correct path. You couldn't leave a man like Frank be and expect him to know he was loved. David hadn't even managed to tell him as much. Of course Frank had left. He didn't know he belonged with David. Having David's blood running through his veins should have been enough of a proclamation but Frank didn't see things the way David did. David's mind was singular. Apart from most other people's. It was an unfortunate side effect of his brilliance. He had a hard time separating the things he knew from other people. He expected everyone to know what he did. He should have _told_ Frank…

 

“Mm, David, _neshama_ ,” Sarah muttered, stirring. “What's wrong?”

 

David laid a hand on Sarah's arm. “It's nothing, _b'sheret_ ,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

 

Sarah whined and blinked. She pushed David's hand away and sat up. “Do you want to go get him?”

 

David chuckled slightly in surprise. A year away from her and he had almost forgotten. While other people didn't know the things he knew, the things he expected other people to know, Sarah seemed to have an uncanny ability to read his mind.

 

“I… I wouldn't even know where to look,” he admitted. “I do though. I want to-”

 

“Bring him home, David,” Sarah said seriously. She already sounded fully awake. _What a woman._

 

“I-”

 

“You have to,” she continued. “He won't come back on his own.”

 

“Yeah, I was just… realizing that,” David said. “But, like I said. I don't know where to look.”

 

“Are you sure?” Sarah asked. She sat up, leaning over David and kissed him on the forehead. “You were together a long enough time for you to learn his patterns. Where did he go, David?”

 

“Somewhere to be alone,” David said. “I'm sure of that much. Somewhere to be alone with his ghosts.”

 

“He shouldn't be alone right now,” Sarah said.

 

David nodded in the darkness. His throat felt a little tight. “Y-yeah, I was realizing that, too.”

 

“You know Frank,” Sarah said, helping David organize his thoughts like she always did. It was only one of many, many reasons David worshipped her like she was the Sabbath Bride herself. “You know his patterns. What does he do?”

 

“The opposite of whatever is healthiest,” David said. Not sardonically but with affection.

 

“So he went somewhere that would be lonely and painful for him,” Sarah said. “So go where that is and bring him home.”

 

David thought for a moment and then leaned up and kissed her. “It's a bit of a drive,” he said. “I won't be home until after the kids go off to school.”

 

Sarah kisse David in return. “Make sure he comes home with you.”

 

And that was why David was driving up north at two in the morning. He'd known immediately where Frank was when Sarah had said the words “lonely and painful.”

 

Gunner’s cabin. It was maybe not as painful a place as that _park_ but it was twice as lonely. David knew Frank was there even before he saw the horrible old van hidden in the brush. David parked his SUV next to it and got out to walk the tedious mile and a half.

 

The sun was coming up by then and it was easier to pick his way around the traps than it could have been. His heart was clenched in his chest as he remembered dragging Frank out of here the first time. Well, he could do it again. He could carry Frank again if he had to. He could tear all the muscles in his shoulders and chest carrying Frank home kicking and screaming if he had to. He had to. Sarah, his _queen_ , had demanded it. His own heart had demanded it with a full inventory of the potential consequences.

 

Frank’s life was David's responsibility. He should have made that more clear when he'd had the chance.

 

**

 

Frank woke up still drunk, still on the floor. His mouth tasted like puke. Scratch that. He was drunk _and_ hungover if the way the sunrise was piercing his eyes through the window was any indication. Drinking nearly a whole bottle of whiskey had been a mistake. He should have finished it. Now it was spilled on the floor and-

 

“Frank?” Now he was hallucinating. That couldn't be David's voice outside the cabin. It was Frank's own stupidity and drunkenness playing tricks on his mind. It wouldn't be the first time.

 

But then there was a pounding on the door that was timed perfectly with some pounding in Frank's skull. Frank groaned and rolled over on his hands and knees. His sock got wet with some of the spilled whiskey and he picked his way carefully to the door. He couldn't remember vomiting but his mouth was so sour, he must have thrown up somewhere and he didn't want to step in whiskey and puke in the same minute. He'd surely yack again if he did.

 

“Frank!”

 

"Stop yellin’, I'm comin’,” Frank growled back. He was half convinced he was just yelling at his own hangover so he was taken aback somewhat when he opened the door and those scary beautiful eyes were piercing him. The sun was rising behind David. He looks like a goddamn angel of _death_. All backlit with fiery reds and oranges. It occurred to Frank that self-immolation was a kind of suicide, too. He could let himself be burned up in David's colors instead of staying here, night after night, flailing to literally drown his sorrows in whiskey. But it was just a different kind of suicide. The kind where he came back alive at the end of it.

 

“Goddamn you, Lieberman,” Frank cursed David instead od thanking him. He'd been so clear, so fucking clear the night before on why he had to go back to the suburbs and apologize and there David was. Taking his choice away from him again.

 

“Nice to see you, too, Frank,” David said, undeterred as ever. When would this idiot fucking _learn to stay away?_

 

“What are you doing here? I told you last night, I made it abundantly clear-”

 

“You look like _shit_ ,” David interrupted Frank and pushed past him into Gunner's cabin. Frank wanted to grab him, shake him and toss him out into the wilderness. “And you smell like cheap booze and puke.”

 

“Yeah?” was Franks _witty_ reply. He scoffed. “Rough night.” He could admit that much out loud. It was an understatement but David was smart. He obviously knew that.

 

David sighed. “I have better whiskey at home than Rich and Rare. You could've gotten drunk on the good stuff in my living room-”

 

“You don't want me drunk around your kids-” Frank interrupted but David cut him off again.

 

“I want you around my family anyway you are, Frank!” David exclaims loudly, firmly. His blue eyes are cold and hard all of the sudden. It's worse than gleaming with tears or hope.

 

Frank was starting to think he'd, in fact, been right to flee from this man. There was too much at stake. Too much damage that look could do to what was left of Frank. “David, listen-”

 

“No, you listen,” David said. He pointed a finger at Frank. Nearly jabbed him in the chest with it “ _You_ listen. You didn't have to see how disappointed everyone was last night. I get that this is hard for you-”

 

“Bull _shit_ ,” Frank interrupted. “You don't got the first clue how hard this is for me.”

 

“Then tell me, Frank!” David said. “Tell me about it all. All the things that hurt and… the things that haunt you and make you wanna run away. Tell me so we can face them together! I can't help you if you tear off every time you get close. You can't heal from everything if you don't let someone help you. Getting drunk in this _place_? Really, Frank? This some kind of messed up punishment or something? Some way of torturing yourself-”

 

“Shut up!” This is why he’d left. David got too close to the heart of him. It burned and cut and gave him a hollow pain in his ribs. And he would break them open for David. He just needed a little more. Just a little more of David insisting he wanted it. Frank had to be sure. He couldn't open this up and spray David with his sick and poison and rot and death until he was sure David really goddamn wanted it. And if it swallowed them both whole in the process, well, there was always the .9mm in the squeaky drawer in the kitchen. Frank only had to hurt for as long as it took him to get the barrel in his mouth. He already knew how it would taste. There was a few moments of silence. David was sulking over Frank shouting at him to shut up.

 

“Sorry,” Frank managed to grumble. “I did this all wrong again, shit.” David gave Frank a look then that about broke Frank's heart. He looked scared. Like he thought Frank was going to hit him.

 

“I just want to help you, Frank. You need help.” Frank sighed and wiped sweat off his brow with his hand.

 

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you're probably right.” He owed David that much. It had seemed so simple when he was still more drunk than hungover. “I'm an ass, David.”

 

“So am I,” David said. He chuckled and tugged on his beard. “I'm such an ass, I drove six hours in the middle of the night to bother a guy who already told me he didn't want me around.”

 

Frank scowled. “I never said that, Jesus!” he exclaimed. “Why do you do shit like that, Lieberman! It's not that I don't want to be around you. Far fucking from it. I wanna be around you so bad it makes me sick.”

 

“Then come _home_!”

 

“I just don't want _you_ around _me_ ,” Frank continued as if he hadn't heard David. But he saw that pain in David's eyes. It was as clear and loud as anything. Frank didn't want to keep hurting David but how else could he make him understand? He was playing tug-of-war with his own heart and losing. He didn't have the strength to play the same against David’s. Much as he might want to, the risk of breaking David's heart was so high….

 

David was quiet for a moment. It was such an agonizing silence. Frank was used to David's constant chatter. He’d grown to like it, even. David's constant words filling up the empty spaces inside of Frank. It was temporary but it was as alive as he ever felt. While he was alone and drunk, he'd known emphatically that he should have let David bring him home. Now that David was here, he was too afraid of the consequences. David deserved better than this.

 

“I don't understand,” David said at last. It wasn't any worse than the silence but the hurt in David's voice was pretty terrible to hear anyway. “What does that even _mean_?”

 

“It means you're a good man and you don't deserve having a guy like me around,” Frank tried to stay even and calm as he explained. “I'm just gonna fuck up your life. Get pain and bullshit all over your precious fucking life. How can you ask me to do that? How can you want that?”

 

He was haunted fleetingly of the memory of asking Maria nearly the same question. How could she want a man like him when she was so good and perfect and pure?

 

Her anwer had been the same as David’s. They both had smiled at him, taken his hand and said. “Because I do.” Later, Frank would want to run away again. He would even try to do so a few times.

 

But David would always come after Frank and bring him back home.


End file.
